Et was barely twenty years ago when people associated products from China with cheap imitations of high-quality branded items. They smelled terribly of chemicals, looked a bit like the originals from a distance, but upon closer inspection turned out to be poorly made plastic clones that barely served their purpose. But they were everywhere. And the question of whether there really were people who bought this junk was answered simply by the existence of their sheer mass. Since then, China has become the world export champion – not despite, but because of the infrastructure it built with its glut of cheap products. Today, products from China are at the forefront of innovation, and there is hardly a Western household that they have not found their way into.
For several years now, China has been flooding a new market with cheap fakes that can hardly convince anyone of their authenticity. These are not physical goods, but digital counterfeits: disinformation that pretends to be something it is not. Fake accounts pose as legitimate actors while their content is falsehoods from non-existent people. And it looks like China is on the verge of opening up the playing field of global information – for several weeks now it has been experimenting with content that is no longer immediately recognizable as fake.
The sheer volume of accounts surprised observers
As early as 2017, the year after Russia influenced the US election campaign with disinformation, Chinese actors began flooding search engines and social networks with their fake content. Since 2019, the posts have been specifically directed against the protests in Hong Kong. This was an attempt to undermine the democracy movement. Social media and digital communication channels played a crucial role in organizing the protests. The Chinese campaign attacked them immediately. But the attempt to exert influence failed.
This was mainly due to the low quality of the posts distributed, which could easily be recognized as fakes. The posts were full of spelling and grammatical errors, some of them pure gibberish, especially when they were written in English. Western observers dubbed the operation “spamouflage.” Threat analyzes by Google and the London think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) concluded that the postings of the Chinese networks are “obviously pointless” (ISD).because they achieved “virtually no organic engagement from real users” (Google)..
The only thing that alarmed the analysts was the number of accounts that they associated with “spamouflage”. Google reported around 100,000 accounts that it deleted from its platforms in 2022. X spoke of hundreds of thousands of blocked accounts that it attributed to the network. Meta said it had banned almost 8,000 accounts. This makes the Chinese operation the world's largest known disinformation campaign. It operates with hundreds of thousands of accounts on more than fifty websites, including all major social media platforms. Even though the contributions up to that point were characterized by their ridiculously poor quality, the analysts emphasized how “persistent and adaptable” (Google) the network was.
Accounts make contributions to Beijing authorities times
At the beginning of the 2020 corona pandemic, “Spamouflage” spread pro-Chinese narratives about the origin of the coronavirus, for example by claiming that the virus originated in a US laboratory. From 2021 onwards, the network targeted American politicians, companies and Chinese people living in the USA who had made critical statements about Beijing: with hate campaigns and threats made by several thousand accounts at the same time. Last year, the US Department of Justice charged 40 Chinese police employees with being behind “spamouflage”.
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